The language of the Invisible Committee fears it that much less. The aspect that most leaps out before its writings is precisely the lack of a consequential logic underlying its affirmations. It seems to be a characteristic of this entire milieu, since already in 2003 the last editors of Tiqqun announced in their (announcement for enlistment and so called) Appel (Call): “The question is not to demonstrate, to argue, to convince. We will go straight to the evident. The evident is not primarily an affair of logic or reasoning. It attaches to the sensible, to worlds.” One already starts to smile over the curious and self-interested mixture of terms. In general, the sensible is as far as can be from an evident. The sensible is subjective, individual, obscure as a riddle that is interpreted by each one individually. The evident, instead, is objective, common, clear as a certainty clarified for all collectively. The sensible is controversial, the evident, no, it is verified. If both are not “affairs of logic”, it is for diametrically opposed reasons. Reason doesn’t have the capacity of making an affair of what lies beyond its range (like the elusive sensible), while it has no need to do it with what is right here (like the evident already taken for granted at a discount). But what interests the authors of Appel, what makes them drool before the evocation of the sensible as evident, is that both are recognized, accepted in any case, and, above all, are not debated. Each one has her own inaccessible sensibility, all yield before the undeniable evident.

It’s the same worry that afflicts the Invisible Committee: not to be called into question. So in order not to incur the risk that its words are examined, pondered, maybe refuted, indeed, in order to make it that they are also immediately conceded and accepted as they are, it feigns a superior indifference for the substance of the contents – a tedious waste of time – preferring to make the readers quiver with thrilling sensations, like silk: intensity, consistency, finesse. In its debut of 2007, it was quick to present itself in the guise not of the responsible author, but rather of the “scribe” who bears no blame, which limits itself to reporting “commonplaces”, “truths” and “observations” of the times. In this way, The Coming Insurrection did not become a book on which to reflect and debate, but rather a book to acknowledge. In short, a sacred text.

Along the same line, To Our Friends is presented as a commentary on some slogans drawn on walls during the revolts that broke out around the world. Every chapter, in fact, takes a bit of graffiti, the image of which is recopied on its opening page, as the title. Through this pathetic expedient the customers are directed to observe the same inferred evidence – it isn’t the Invisible Committee speaking, it is the global insurrection; hey, have you seen? the global insurrections say exactly what the Invisible Committee says! Well, of course, after all, the walls of this planet agree with everyone from democrats to fascists, from religious fanatics to sports fans, even sex maniacs. You just have to choose the right photograph.

It’s not hard to grasp that for common mortals intent on making themselves pass for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is only one sure method for making their words infallible: saying everything and its contrary. Flip through the pages of the Invisible Committee and you remain certain that every one of its statements, peremptory as befits a piece of evidence, will know a few pages later an equally peremptory denial. In this way, what it maintains will always be true and those who criticize it will support, by force of circumstance the false. Its intention to untangle the “greatest confusion”, to “untangle the skein of the present, and in places to settle accounts with ancient falsehoods”, through a hurricane of contradictions, sophisms and absurdities, is curious, but we fear that such confusions and such falsehoods can only increase after the reading of its books in which every least bit of logic and consequentiality are literally demolished.

The examples that one might make on the matter risk being endless. We have already seen how the Invisible Committee shows off its modesty to satisfy its vanity. It doesn’t miss any opportunity to insult the left, by which however it gets published and with whomit theorizes having relationships. It denounces the recuperation and impotence of radical ideas when put in the service of the commerce of publishing, but they don’t hesitate to practice it. It thunders about wanting to desert this world, but doesn’t tolerate those who abandon it (unlike these latter, to secede from the world, it seizes it in order to grasp its position!). It complains of the human being alienated by the technological trinkets, then exhorts people to use them after having revealed the ethic of the technique. With regards to ethics, it considers them adorable but only in the service of politics. It admits that insurrection depends on qualitative criteria, while it explains why one cannot do without the quantitative. It cites outlaws who deny the existence of another world , then announces that it creates worlds. It sees war everywhere and wants to make it in such a devastating way that it does not designate the enemy, but rather seeks to makes friends with it. It is interested in any demand-based struggle, originating with any pretext, but then blames those who raise the question of austerity. It critiques time and again the myth of assemblyism and the anxiety over legitimacy present in many struggles, while it exalts the great merit of those that are most infected with them. It throws the self-organizational capacities people put into action when they are suddenly deprived of state services in the face of realists, and then becomes realistic in its turn and prescribes courses that prevent/preempt self-organization for all. It invites the forgetful to remember the ancient insurrectional origin of the term “popular” (populor = devastate) but deliberately omit explaining that the devastation was that carried out by soldiers in war (populus = army). It wants life to put roots into the earth, but it doesn’t tolerate ideas putting roots into life. While it sets forth its critique of the areas of the movement if accuses those subversives who criticize the areas of the movement of “auto-phagy”. It reproaches revolutionaries for not understanding that power is found in the infrastructures, that it is therefore necessary to strike there, but then warn against taking action. Since everything organizing itself requires attention and everything being organized requires management, it invites becoming-revolutionaries to be organized. It proclaims the end of civilization, by warning that its technical complexity makes it immortal. It mocks the divisions that weaken the movement, but acknowledges that fragmentation could make it indomitable. It goes into ecstasy over the impulse of spontaneism, but it’s best if it is not completely spontaneist. Along with “comrade Deleuze”, it supports the need to be the most centralist of the centralists, but then, along with an Egyptian comrade, supports not wanting leaders, so that the centrality, in order not to be too oppressive, must be transversal. These are just a few examples to explain the nausea that assails us after a few ups and downs on the theoretical roller-coaster of those who in 2007 announced The Coming Insurrection and in 2014 revealed that the aim of every prophecy is to “impose here and now waiting, passivity, submission”.

Now when one runs into someone who can habitually stoop to contradictory claims, a doubt spontaneously and immediately arises: is she aware of the absurdities she maintains? If he doesn’t notice them, perhaps his intelligence is quite limited. If, on the other hand, she is aware of it, why does she do it? There would be some not very clear motivation behind it, which escapes us. In short, the conclusion which one reaches in these cases is that there are only two alternatives. Either one is dealing with an aware person, who is then an opportunist. Or, otherwise, one is dealing with an imbecile.

But the Invisible Committee, as one can easily see, is certainly not imbecilic. The other, much more reliable theory remains. This explains the reason for the deep disgust that pervades us in reading its texts (the same that we felt on reading that Appel (Call) which, in whatever way and whoever its authors were, anticipated them inside the movement). Could it be that we are victims of that revolutionary romanticism that loves to see in every enemy of the constituted order a Warrior for the Idea; could it be that, like Winston Smith, we also have not managed very well to detach ourselves from the conventions of oldspeak: but could we not feel disgusted before those who would like to make revolutions through the contortions of doublethink? This may all be commercially and politically convenient – as the editorial success of the invisible Committee and the electoral success of its first Fan Club indicate – but it remains ethically appalling.

IV

“In the tremors of the uprisings,

I held, as anchors for every storm,

ten to twelve party badges in my pocket.”

Giuseppe Giusti, A Toast to Turncoats

In Latin, it seems it had origins in a dig at the master of rhetoric, Cicero, who was accustomed“duabus sellis sedere” (to sit on two thrones). In French today they say “jouer sur les deux tableaux” (to play on two gameboards). In German, it becomes “zwischen Baum und Borke leben” (to live between the tree and the bark). In Spanish it sounds like “nadar entre dos aguas” (to swim in two waters). In Italian it is “tenere i piedi in più scarpe” (to have one’s feet in many shoes). While in English it is “to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds”.

Every language has a colorful expression of its own to point out the attitude of one who doesn’t hesitate to change opinion and behavior according to the moment and the situation, to describe the oscillations of turncoats, of chameleons, of double-crossers. Opportunism is an old defect that afflicts politics, whether reformist or revolutionary. Like the Calls, it becomes manifest above all in periods of manifest crisis. When events go along at a more or less regular rhythm, it is easy to keep theory and practice, means and ends, together. But when that rhythm gets disrupted, when urgency takes over the mind, that is when people are transformed into acrobats of Tactics. From the search for what one considers right (an ethical question), one turns to the search for what one considers functional and convenient (techno-political questions), closing one’s eyes to possible incongruities. Some of those Spanish anarchists who would become government ministers knew about this, for example, Garcia Oliver who – going in the course of a few months from robbing banks to drawing up decreed laws – began to demand “using the same methods as the enemy, and especially discipline and unity”.

The characteristic of the Invisible Committee is not that of putting into action a practice that contradicts any of its theory, since from the start it maintains opposing theories, flinging open the door to any practice whatsoever. It is so full of contradictions as to no longer even appears contradictory. On the contrary. In fact, if one can say everything and its opposite, then one can also do everything and its opposite. This is the secret of its success: giving a semblance of coherence to incoherence. This is what has affected its editor Hazan, theoretical critic of advertising, which he utilizes in practice, as well as a revolutionary editor of judges and cops and supporter of presidential candidates. And this also seems to excite its admirers in Tarnac, who, after having learned yesterday that “visibility must be avoided” and that it is necessary “get organized” coherently, and before repeating today that “disgust, pure negativity, and absolute refusal are the only discernable [sic] political forces of the moment”, have thought it good to come into the political and media limelight. But don’t suppose that the editor and Fan Club are not in agreement with the observation that “for two whole centuries elections have been the most widely used instrument after the army for suppressing insurrections”, they had simply already learned in 2007 that “Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote.” A wasted effort since it is well-known, except in Tarnac, that capital ever since “the revolutionaries of the years 1960-1970 were quite clear that they wanted nothing to do with it … selects its people … territory by territory”. Everything clear, true?

Naturally this absolute lack of coherence is also and above all what attracts the Committee’s customers, the thing for which they are doubly grateful. First of all for producing goods at an essentially affordable price that allow them to enter into the virtual reality of insurrection, of living a thousand adventures “as if they were true” without taking the risk of getting scratched. To the readers it is enough to leaf through its books to see oneself seated at the table of the Strategic Committee for Global Insurrection, the words of the insurgents of Tharir square in one’s ears, the streets of Exarchia before one’s eyes, Edward Snowden on the run from the CIA sitting on the right and sub-comandante Marcos on the left. Because, ultimately, according to the Invisible Committee itself, everything is reduced to being a mere question of perception and sensibility. A hit of adrenaline that is extended even after the reading of the book, since at that point the readers feel stirred up and gratified and free to do anything whatever, even if he was a nuclear technician in the service of the army. Police and fascists excluded (in anticipation of the firing squad, or of some future tactical utilization?), everyone else now knows that they can one day unite with the revolutionaries, the true revolutionaries, those who look neither at intentions nor at individual responsibilities, but only at technical competence.

Such a practical eclecticism is not just the implicit consequence of the contemporary formulation of more opposing thoughts, or of the lack of a coherent and consistent theory, since it is explicitly theorized by the Committee itself. After and as Tiqqun, it repeats like a mantra the need of an action based on a situational ethic. Or rather on the relaxed availability, capacity, ability to adapt oneself to circumstances, to merge into the environment, to be – to say it in the I.C.’s way – “at the height of the situation”. Here one might refer to the ancient sophist relativism of Gorgia, but it better to leave it in the vulgar oldspeak of the ends that justify the means. If already in Call one could read that “To get organised means: to start from the situation and not dismiss it. To take sides within it. Weaving the necessary material, affective and political solidarities … The position within a situation determines the need to forge alliances, and for that purpose to establish some lines of communication, some wider circulation. In turn those new links reconfigure the situation”, in To Our Friends, the I.C. maintains that, “Conflict is the very stuff of what exists. So the thing to do is to acquire an art of conducting it, which is an art of living on a situational footing, and which requires a finesse and an existential mobility instead of a readiness to crush whatever is not us” managing in this way “in the complexity of the movements, to discern the shared friends, the possible alliances, the necessary conflicts. According to a logic of strategy, and not of dialectics”.

Even though the Invisible Committee sometimes opportunistically invoked it, the refusal of the world – what incites to desertion, to secession – is not at all considered a basis for sedition, but rather for renunciation. The I.C. sees deserting this world, staying outside of it, as the first step toward the rancorous impotence of the hermitage. This is why the I.C. doesn’t at all exhort to breaking ranks, but to taking one’s sideinside, or rather reconfiguring them. In fact, the true crisis gets defined as “that of presence” and to come out of it, it is necessary to heed the admonition of a member of Telecomix: “What is certain is that the territory you’re living in is defended by persons you would do well to meet. Because they’re changing the world and they won’t wait for you.” If it is the state defending the territory, if it is the state changing the world, if it is the state not waiting for subversives … well, let the latter hurry to catch up with the state, to go meet with it. They might give it some good advice.

But this is not desertion at all: deserters are those who no longer obey orders, who abandon the spaces in which they are restricted, throw off the uniforms, and go into hiding. What the I.C. propose instead in To Our Friends is an infiltration starting from the bottom. A nearly impossible tactic to put into practice (except in films dear to the Committee like Fight Club), but very easy to theorize about on paper (as the early situationists well knew). A tactic that requires a predisposition to falsehood, an inclination to hypocrisy, complicity in abjection, tolerance for infamy, and that has always accompanied the worst betrayals. But when it’s a question of tightening necessary political solidarities, there are those who don’t get lost in operative doubts or in ethical scruples.

In this regard, To Our Friends contains intoxicating passages. According to the Committee, “insurrections no longer base themselves on political ideologies, but on ethical truths. Here we have two words that, to a modern sensibility, sound like an oxymoron when they’re brought together. Establishing what is true is the role of science, is it not? – science having nothing to do with moral norms and other contingent values.” When it has to approach the words truth and ethics, the Committee excuses itself with embarrassment as if it had belched in public. To such hyper-modern eyes, such an approach can only seem like an oxymoron. Ultimately, it’s understandable. Ethics dies on contact with politics, politics weakens on contact with ethics. This is why anyone who is obsessed with the search for what is convenient can do nothing less than recall how their values are “contingent” (or rather accidental, random, incidental, conditional). For every outdated spirit, the ethical truths wielded by the Invisible Committee make them roll on the floor laughing as these truths are fickle, synonymous with convenient opinions. An ethical truth takes hold of an entire life, 24 hours out of 24, not the time of a situation with the sole aim of tightening a strategic alliance.

But the moment the ethical ballast is jettisoned, according to the I.C. it goes without saying that “We have an absolutely clear field for any decision, any initiative, as long as they’re linked to a careful reading of the situation … Our range of action is boundless.” Boundless, clear? However little the situation requires it, it is possible to do anything. It’s what Nechaev thought in the past, or Bin Laden in the present. So one understands the reason why the I.C. regrets that “Since the catastrophic defeat of the 1970s, the moral question of radicality has gradually replaced the strategic question of revolution.” To be strategic, the revolutionary has to be as subtle and mobile as a rubber band, she must be able to easily go from the balaclava to the suit and tie, from conflicts with the police in the streets to handshakes with colleagues in the government buildings. One must be capable of spitting on those in power and kissing subversives today, and tomorrow kissing those in power and spitting on subversives. To achieve this result it is necessary to have done with those individuals and those groups so stupid and presumptuous as to get impeded by values that the believe to be their own and autonomous, which they follow like the dog follows its master. It is necessary instead to make way for the “historical party”, phantasm invested with a higher mission – leading to the revolution – in a position to justify every base act carried out by its human militants in flesh and blood in the course of their intelligent and modest slalom between the sensible weathercocks of situations.

But where do all these considerations come to? To Tarnac, for example. It was hard for Invisible Committeeto swallow that in 2008-2009 its most enthusiastic fans (or members, according to some points of view) were mocked, taunted, sometimes even pushed out of movement situations, after having clearly shown what their conflict is made of, when, to these admirers of Blanqui who spent more than thirty years behind bars, a few weeks in prison seemed to be enough to send them running under the skirts of the disparaged Left in search of protection. Which is why, after years of meditation weighing things up, here is the tactical defense of such behavior: “When repression strikes us, let’s begin by not taking ourselves for ourselves. Let’s dissolve the fantastical terrorist subject …”. It isn’t the claim of innocence, no. It isn’t panic, no. It isn’t the absence of the least bit of dignity, no. It is a winning strategic move. In effect, in this life of the daily repression of desires, it seems to us precisely that the whole lesson of the I.C. is reduced to this: no longer take yourself for yourself.

In the same way, it is always in defense of its Tarnac fans – since March 2014 neo-municipal-council-members, then mass media opinion-makers, and more recently even admonishers of police investigators to whom they suggest which investigative trails to follow – that the Committee emphasizes the imperious tactical necessity of establishing contacts with the other side, with all those who might prove useful tomorrow: “We need to go look in every sector, in all the territories we inhabit, for those who possess strategic technical knowledge … This process of knowledge accumulation, of establishing collusions in every domain, is a prerequisite for a serious and massive return of the revolutionary question.” This is why recently the most revolutionary grocers in France have gone to knock on the doors of a pair of embassies in London to pay homage to two of the great victims of persecution for telematic Free Information. One is an Australian hacker who aided the police of his country in the hunt for “pedophiles” (those monsters who, behind the closed doors of their habitation, collect and look at obscene photographs of children and who therefore, not being 19th century celebrities like Lewis Carroll or Pierre Louÿs, deserve only prison), the other is an American information technician in the service of the CIA since 2006, after an accident that happened to him during his training shattered his dream of fighting with the Special Forces in Iraq. Here absolutely are two people to know, because they defend the territory, change the world and possess necessary knowledge. And so, two precious allies of revolutionaries, as the condition of both objectively shows since they find themselves targeted by the United States government. After all, as the I.C. puts it: “A gesture is revolutionary not by its own content but by the sequence of effects it engenders. The situation is what determines the meaning of the act, not the intention of its authors.” Which means that individual intentions don’t count for anything, only the results count and it is up to the future to establish who is or isn’t revolutionary. A Marinus Van der Lubbe, to give a name, you can forget him. What did he do that was revolutionary? Nothing, the loser. Considering it well, indeed, now there is no more doubt: there is hope even for cops and fascists. A hope of redemption, of atonement, in short, of “tiqqun”.

In case it isn’t sufficiently clear, after the passage of the Invisible Committee nothing is left intact but a political idea; and that is, for example, that one can be a state functionary and a revolutionary at the same time.

V

“A system of terror reached its peak when the victim is no longer aware of the chasmthat exists

between himself and his butchers.In the inhuman atmosphere of totalitarianism, and as

a consequence of the collapse of the personality,the archaic mechanismof imitation gains

the forestage without any inhibition …For any system of power, there is no greater success

in acceptance, by its powerless victims, of the values and modes of behavior it postulates.”

Leo Löwenthal, Individual and Terror

The one who poses as a free spirit without ethical obligations is not afraid to have recourse to continuous contradictions, which she considers only a series of easy solutions. Setting aside every ethical concern, the practical problem is that in this way one does nothing more than consent and contribute to the decomposition of reality in course. The confusion is not disentangled by any clarity; it is only replaced by a kind of opacity – a term favored by the Invisible Committee – useful to the ruling order. To understand this, it is enough to reflect on the abyss that divides the effects caused by the use of contradiction, on the one hand in poetic language that abandons itself to the wild frenzy of the imagination, on the other hand in discursive language aiming to describe the contours of reality.

Constituting itself precisely as the refusal of the functional language of logic, poetry wants to be a form of expression free from utilitarian and projectual intentions. As someone maintained, it is a perversion of words capable of destroying the things that it names. The invention of surprising images through the mixing of words that don’t fit together implies the immediate exclusion of the acquired knowledge and rules connected to words. In this way poetry subverts the order of discourse and throws open the entrance to the unknown. As journalist in Moscow wrote about the avant-garde zaum poetry of Kručenych, who in 1912 announce the World-Backwards that would be seen throughout the Russian streets a few years later, “whoever undermines language, undermines social structures, that are based precisely on linguistic communication”. It is due to this conviction that in the past – before everything was overwhelmed by the indistinct mud of commerce – there was no lack of subversives convinced that poetry could even materially undermine the order of things. Between a Nicolas Boileau (protected by King Louis XIV) who decreed, “I cannot name anything except by its name. I call a cat a cat” and Jean-Paul Sartre (enlightened by Stalin) who repeated, “The function of a writer is to call a cat a cat,” Benjamin Péret, furious in revolt, burst in to launch his challenge – “I call tobacco the thing which is ear” – and take up arms in the Spanish revolution.

But what happens if contradiction, abandoning the language of the unknown, invades that of reality, or rather discursive, philosophical, rational language itself? The perception of reality is not subverted or threatened, but gets neutralized by becoming undifferentiated. In this way, reality itself is sheltered from critique, form being called into question, since all possible points of reference are lacking. This is exactly the goal for which the spread of oxymorons in common, everyday language aims. When Rimbaud evoked the “drunken boat” it was an invitation to the derangement of the senses, whereas the “clean atom” dear to scientists justifies nuclear technology, “humanitarian war” in mouth of generals legitimizes slaughter, the “ethical bank” instituted by entrepreneurs polishes up speculation. In discursive language, the mixing of words that don’t fit together does not evoke the unknown, it perpetuates the known. Unlike what happens in poetry, it does not incite to the overcoming of the existent, it does not open extraordinary horizons; it does exactly the opposite. It makes what now exists safe, undermining critical thought. That even the enemies of this social order have set out along this path, the ones who take part in Critical Mass datesand the ones who sign the associative pact of an Informal Federation, doesn’t arouse astonishment. It is yet another demonstration of the widespread incapacity to avoid the symmetrically critiqued curse – but hey, not so serious! – on To Our Friends.

While contemplating the Angel of History in the company of Walter Benjamin, the man who pushed his absence from the world to the point of not even being able to make himself a cup of coffee, it’s a shame that the Invisible Committee hasn’t even noted that “criticism is a matter of the right distance”, the reason why it finds itself “at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted”. An excessive nearness can make one see otherwise imperceptible details that are often useful and important, but it doesn’t allow one to grasp the horizon in one’s gaze, and at the same time takes away meaningand movement. The particular becomes significant when it enriches and perfects the picture of the whole, when it allows one to grasp its aspects in depth, otherwise it is reduced to a mere quirk. In the same way, excessive distance leads to catching sight of a much too hazy and incomprehensible panorama. If one loses the right distance, impossible to calculate with precision but sufficiently clear to approach it in order to explore, critique becomes civic reproach or ideological condemnation.

The same can be said of hatred. This feeling of peremptory hostility is made possible by the distance from its object. The enemy is considered other than oneself, an indispensable condition for going to war against him. If he were considered one’s like, if he breathed the same air, if she spoke the same language, if she had the same desires, if one shared the same existence with the enemy (perhaps sitting at the same table in a popular diner or in a television studio or in a municipal council to discuss the same problems), he would cease to be perceived as such, becoming if need be an interlocutor and possible ally. The aversion in her presence, granting that it still exists, would assume the traits of mere annoyance. The best way to stop hating an enemy is to start to spend time with him. From day to day, he would become at most an acquaintance with whom to disagree, or a rival with whom to compete. The closeness would banish the hatred, but not the suffering, the uneasiness, the anxiety of living. And then the only war that could break out, after having long brooded in secret grumbling, is another: civil war, in the worst sense of the term, blind and undifferentiated rancor.

Now, this may be the worst aspect of the Invisible Committee’s storytelling. With its defense of the situation as the sole criterion of behavior, it does away with perspective by eradicating distances. But in this way it annihilates all hostility. Immersed in the whirlpool of doublethink, tied to a moment without past or future, the I.C. no longer knows who it needs to fight against, whether Eurasia, Eastasia or Oceania. Who are they? Who are we? They, are they always they? We, are we always we? But then, is it necessary to fight? One only has to consider what it writes when it is out to identify power: it isn’t in the state, it is in the government; but government is no long in the government, it is in the infrastructure; but it is necessary not to strike the infrastructure if first one hasn’t formed a competent technical force! What’s left? Nothing, it’s like a game of three card monte. If a totality no longer exists but only distinct fragments separated from each other, that are ceaselessly interweave in a whirling spiral, it is clear that before us there are only flashes, situations, reconfigurations of the present elements. Yesterdays enemy can calmly become today’s political friend, and vice versa. And this is an awareness that leads to developing a particular “sensibility”, that of avoiding points of rupture with no return.

In short, all the refrains about the “situation”, about “sharing” or about “necessary alliances”, aim to spread the need of putting an end to absolute differences. But the end of differences leads to the end of hostilities. And this is why today, within the revolutionary movement itself, people are no longer able to hate even the snitches whose presence is tolerated no only in magazines (as happens in the United States with the well-known theorist of the abolition of work), but also as the head of movements of struggle (as happened in Italy with the No Tav struggle). Why not, at bottom what did they do that was so bad? If they situation required it, they could do anything whatever. And the subversive in England who taught the police how to control the crowd during demonstration, or the other one in Greece who became a government functionary? Why not, they have gone to meet those who defend the territory. It is not surprising that the figure of the recuperator, for whose head many subversives would call up until not so many years ago, has disappeared completely from every revolutionary critique; not because there is any lack of those who would like to act as mediators between the Institutions and the Movement, whose numbers, on the contrary increase as far as the eye can see, but because such a role is now recognized and appreciated by (almost) everyone.

“The ‘removal of opposites’ constituted of western metaphysics,” Cesarano wrote. Heir of Tiqqun, a publication literally infested with metaphysics, the Invisible Committee becomes the champion of a single idea: the idea that truth is the play of many small, reconcilable truths, an idea that is based on the cancellation of the possibility that an irreducible deviation exists. The end of otherness, the end of critique, the end of hatred. It is about an aspiration that, besides being indicative, is nothing new.